by K'wan
“You sure you don’t wanna chill? You’re more family than half the muthafuckas out there eating and drinking up our shit,” Tommy offered.
Hammer looked to Shai, who didn’t seem to be feeling the idea. “Nah man, I’m gonna cut out. I got some shit I need to take care of on the streets anyway. I’ll get with you later.” He turned to leave.
“Yo Hammer, where are you staying in case I need to reach you so we can finish our talk?” Shai called after him.
“I’ll be around,” Hammer said over his shoulder on his way out.
Tommy waited until Hammer was out of sight before ripping into Shai. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Slim? That man is not only a street legend, but he’s family and you treated him like some bird nigga looking for an opportunity to suck your dick!”
Shai spun on him, eyes blazing. “First of all, lower your fucking voice. If I wanted this to be a public conversation, I wouldn’t have told Swann and them to leave. Tommy, you out here praising this dude like you ready to give him the keys to the palace and you only known him a few minutes!”
“Shai, you bugging. We knew Hammer all our lives, you were just too young to really remember him,” Tommy waved him off.
“Exactly, I was too young to remember him and Poppa never went out of his way to make sure I did either, so that tells me something about our friend the Hammer. Think about it, T. We knew all the war stories, but whenever we’d try to ask about Poppa’s relationship with Hammer outside of hustling, he never gave us a straight answer. For as much as our father loved to praise fallen legends, how come he never heaped no great amount of praise on Hammer?”
“Slim, I hear what you’re saying, but try and see it my way. Hammer isn’t some random dude; he was Poppa’s old running buddy. Dudes from that era that are still around and able-bodied enough to put in work are like unicorns, bro. Think about the advantages to having someone like the Hammer with us?”
“Or the damage he could do,” Shai countered. “Black, you know how much I depend on your counsel. You’ve been my guardian angel since before I inherited the throne. You love me, and I know you’d never intentionally steer me wrong, but this isn’t about me. Every decision I make has to be with the good of the family in mind. We don’t know that the guy who walked in here today is the same man Poppa trusted to have his back two decades ago. Time changes all things, especially the hearts of men.”
Tommy let out a sigh, knowing his brother had a valid point. “You’re right, Slim. I’m sorry if it sounded like I was trying to undermine you with all this, it’s just that there’s a part of me that’s still trying to wrap itself around the fact that Poppa isn’t here. Hammer represents a part of our father’s history and could help us get to know Poppa in ways we never could growing up. I guess that’s why I wanted to keep him close.”
Shai laid a reassuring hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “Black, you ain’t the only one tugging a heavy heart behind them. I think we all miss Poppa, and that’s all the more reason we do all we can to preserve his legacy. The best way to accomplish this is leading with our heads and not our hearts.”
“So you think we should cut Hammer loose?” Tommy asked.
“Not necessarily. For now we’ll just keep him at a safe distance until we’re sure what his agenda is,” Shai told him.
“And who says he’s got an agenda?”
Shai smirked. “If there’s one thing that you taught me growing up, it’s that there’s always an agenda.”
“And here I thought you weren’t listening,” Tommy said as he playfully punched Shai in the leg.
Their moment was broken up when Brutus came jogging out to the lagoon. He was usually the picture of calm, but there was a worried expression on his face. Shai’s first thoughts were that something happened with Honey or the baby, and it filled his heart with dread. “What is it?” he asked nervously.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Shai. We’ve got a problem at the front gate,” Brutus told him.
“Don’t I pay you niggas to handle that kind of shit?” Shai snapped. He hadn’t meant to come across like that, but it was rare that he got to bond with his brother and Brutus was intruding on that.
“You know I wouldn’t have come back here fucking with you unless I didn’t have any other choice,” Brutus told him. Then he hesitated. “Well, spit it out nigga!” Tommy ordered. “It’s your sister.”
*
Brutus led the way down the driveway, with Shai bringing up the rear, pushing Tommy. He was moving so fast that Tommy feared he would flip the chair over. Before they had even made it to the gate, they could hear the shouting. Some of the guests had wandered from the baby shower to partake the spectacle that was unfolding at the front gate.
They heard the shouting long before they made it to the foot of the driveway. When they rounded the bend, the first thing he noticed was a young man leaning against a motorcycle. He watched with an amused look on his face as Swann, along with two members of the security staff, tried to calm a young woman. She was tall and curvaceous, dressed in black leather pants, the matching motorcycle jacket and high-heeled boots. Her long back hair was mussed, and plastered to her face. Dangling from her hand was a pink and black striped helmet that she waved threateningly while addressing security. Swann had his hands raised submissively, trying his best to get the girl to calm down, but she was too far gone to hear anything he was saying. He made the mistake of touching her arm, and was rewarded by her bringing the helmet around and nearly missing his skull. Reflexively, Swann’s fist balled, and had it not been for Shai, he couldn’t say for sure what he would have done, family or not.
“What the fuck?” Shai’s voice boomed.
“My fault, Shai. I tried to get her to chill, but as you can see she ain’t really hearing me,” Swann explained.
Shai patted his shoulder. “It ain’t your fault, my nigga. I saw it all. Disperse this crowd, I got it from here,” he instructed as he continued towards the girl. Her legs were shaky and her eyes were bloodshot. “Hope?”
“There’s my big brother!” the youngest Clark child said, way louder than she needed to. “I told you niggas that I was connected!” Her drunken eyes passed over the security staff mockingly.
“Hope, what the fuck are you doing here? You’re supposed to be away at school,” Shai asked, trying to make heads or tails of what he was seeing. Hope was the baby girl of their family and the straight arrow of the three children. She had managed to keep her nose clean through all of their ups and downs, and seemed the most likely to avoid their family curse. After high school, she had gone off to attend Howard University, and she rarely came home unless it was a holiday or special occasion. She put distance between herself and the family, and Shai couldn’t blame her, considering how they lived. She was grown now and Shai had no illusions as to her being an angel, but he didn’t know the drunk ass broad standing before him.
“I needed a little break so I figured I’d come see my family, but your little toy-cops trying to act like I can’t get into my own house,” she slurred. “You got all these leaches in here sucking on the blood of my family, and your little toy-cops trying to tell me that me and mine ain’t welcome!”
Shai looked to Brutus for an explanation.
“They showed up drunk, and tried to ride the bike up the driveway. I asked homie to park it and walk up, so as to avoid a potential accident and that’s when baby sis wigged out,” Brutus explained.
“Fuck is you to call me baby sis, like we got history?” Hope said drunkenly, waggling her finger in Brutus’ face. “Nigga, you ain’t really family. You just another nigga eating off our plate, waiting for a chance to try and snatch the whole meal. Just because I don’t come around as much don’t mean I’m blind to what’s going on. You think I don’t see the way you look at my brother when his back is turned? The way you look at his woman? You just like the rest of these muthafuckas, waiting to lay claim to something that don’t belong to you.”
Brutus’ face darkened. “
Shai, if you don’t need me anymore, I’m going to go and make the rounds.”
“Yeah, handle your business. And I’m sorry about all this,” Shai said apologetically.
Brutus nodded and continued on his way. “You better watch that nigga, Shai,” Hope fake-whispered. “He got larceny in his heart.”
“And you got alcohol in your blood. How the fuck you gonna show up at Honey’s baby shower drunk like this?” Shai snapped.
“Chill out, Slim. I ain’t drunk. I’m just a little tipsy,” Hope declared, before throwing up in the driveway. “Damn, maybe I’m a little more faded than I thought,” she laughed, before pitching forward into Shai’s arms.
“Jesus on a damn cross,” Shai sighed, looking down at his drunken sister. “Yo, y’all get her up to the house,” he directed the two members of his security team who had been standing by watching. When they took his sister off his hands, he turned his attention to the smirking young man on the motorcycle. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Oh!” The young man straightened his posture and extended his hand. “My name is Snake. Me and Hope been dating the last few months.”
Shai looked at his hand, but didn’t shake it. “You bring her here in that condition?”
“On my kids, she was already on one when I picked her up,” Snake lied. He and Hope had been getting thrashed together, but her tolerance for liquor happened to be lower than his.
“Fucking idiot,” Shai mumbled, before heading back towards the house.
“Mr. Clark,” Snake turned to Tommy. “I know this might be a bad time, but in case I never get this opportunity again, let me just say how much respect I have for you and your family. You were like a God to me growing up. I was as excited as a kid on Christmas when Hope said I’d finally get to meet you today.” Tommy glanced up at him. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Snake,” he repeated.
“Well, Snake, how about you get on your fucking crotch-rocket and wheel your ass outta here before I have my boys stick you somewhere cold and dark,” Tommy said coldly.
“But I was just trying to pay my respect, you know? Give you your props,” Snake explained, not understanding what he could have said to offend him.
“And so you have. Now get the fuck from around here!” Tommy spat, before turning in his chair and wheeling himself back up the driveway.
“Could this day get any worse?” Shai was grumbling when Tommy finally caught up to him.
“Give it time. It’s still early,” Tommy laughed and kept wheeling up the path. Had he bothered to turn around, he’d have noticed the murderous look Snake was giving him.
CHAPTER 13
Duffy breathed a sigh of relief when he walked into his one-bedroom apartment, which was located on the Upper East Side and boasted a view of the FDR drive. It was small, but nice. He kicked his shoes off and massaged his sore feet. He was glad when Tommy cut him loose for the night. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the luxuries of the Clarks’ fancy parties, but only in small doses. Galas weren’t really his thing; he was a street nigga and always more comfortable in his element.
He had quite a bit to do, but first he had to get mentally and physically prepared. He twisted up a blunt of sticky from his stash, and fired it up while changing into something more fitting of the task at hand: black jeans, a hoodie and Timberlands. Strapping his glock to his hip, Duffy hit the door and went out into the concrete jungle.
Duffy pushed his E-Class Mercedes through Harlem at slightly above a cruise. The engine was so quiet that if the car hadn’t been moving, he wouldn’t have even known it was running. It was a hell of an upgrade over the Toyota Celica he had been pushing a year prior, and a leap from his days riding the trains and buses to get where he needed to go. Tommy Clark had not only upgraded his means of transportation, but his life.
He had first met the eldest Clark male on Riker’s Island. Duffy had been there fighting a gun possession charge. He had gotten into a shootout with a rival crew and took two bullets before they arrested him. His wounds were what landed him in the infirmary where Tommy was being kept. At first, he had no clue who Tommy was, but from the respect he was shown by staff and inmates alike, Duffy knew he was someone important on the streets. Back then, Tommy was still getting used to dealing with his condition, so he wasn’t the friendliest cat. He kept to himself and rarely talked unless it was to bark on one of the guards or the doctors. The other inmates waited on him hand and foot, with hopes of Tommy putting them on, but Duffy kept his distance. For as much as he wanted to cut into Tommy like the rest of them, he knew following the trend would get him nowhere. For nights on end, he toiled over ways to put himself on Tommy’s radar, but there was nothing you could offer to a man who had everything. He needed to find a way for Tommy to notice him, and he found it with a book.
Duffy was street smart, but had never been academically sound. He couldn’t read very well, so sometimes he had to read aloud to himself to make sure the words were right. It drove the other inmates crazy, but none of them had the nuts to come over and shut him up. One day he had been reading a copy of a book called Gangsta that he had gotten from the prison library. He had just dog-eared his page and closed his book for the night, when Tommy spoke to him for the first time.
“Keep going,” Tommy said from his bed.
At first Duffy wasn’t sure who he was talking to, but when he looked over, Tommy was staring at him. “The book, keep going. I wanna know if the nigga is gonna make it out of New York.”
Duffy wasn’t sure what else to do, so he opened the book back up and kept reading. It was almost day-break before they got to Lou-Loc’s tragic end, and for a while after he was done, Duffy and Tommy discussed the book. This became their thing, and every night, Duffy would read while Tommy got lost in the stories. This is how their friendship developed. Duffy had once asked Tommy why he made him read to him every night instead of listening to some of the audio books that the library carried, and Tommy simply replied, “Because the narrator’s voices don’t take me back to where I come from.”
Eventually, Duffy was sent back into general population to continue fighting his charge. A few months later, Tommy was going home to his family. He promised Duffy that he would reach out and try to do what he could for him once he was back on the streets, but that’s what most prisoners say when they’re going home and their friends were still left sitting. Duffy hadn’t put much stock into the promise, until he had a random legal visit from a man he had never seen before who introduced himself as his new counsel. It took nearly a year of court dates and vanishing witnesses, but the charges against Duffy were eventually reduced and he was released with time served and ten years felony probation. Duffy didn’t like the idea of spending the next decade at the end of a leash, but it beat serving time. On the day he walked out of the courtroom, Tommy was there to greet him. He had been a man of his word, and from that day forward, Duffy had been on the Clark payroll, but his loyalties were with Tommy.
When Duffy arrived at the address Tommy had given him, he had to look at it twice to make sure he hadn’t read it wrong. It was an old building in Harlem that looked like it hadn’t been lived in for some time. Most of the windows were boarded up, but he could see the faint glow of a light in one of them. Somebody was home.
Cautiously, he got out of the car and approached the building. There was a thin piece of plywood that served as the entrance, if you could even call it that. Upon closer inspection, he saw words spray painted just above the door: “Welcome to hell.” It was a bad omen, but Duffy would rather take his chances with whatever was lurking within the dark building than disappoint Tommy Clark. Against his better judgment, he stepped inside.
The first thing Duffy noticed when he crossed the threshold was the cold. It had nothing to do with the temperature outside; more like an unsettling chill in his bones. He ventured deeper into the building, crunching glass and debris under his Timberlands. He noticed that the floor was littered with more junk food and
candy wrappers than anything. At the end of the hall, a staircase loomed. The dim light at the top of it flickered on and off as if daring Duffy to continue. He did.
Duffy crept up the rickety stairs. Seemingly coming from all around him, he heard the faint sounds of what thought were children giggling. He stopped to listen closer, but there was nothing. With his gun now in hand, dangling at his side, Duffy continued up to the next floor. When he reached the landing, he felt the chill again. This time it was different, as if someone had moved passed him. Duffy turned but didn’t see anything except two rats in the corner, fighting over a discarded cupcake.
“You know where you at, blood?” a voice came from behind Duffy spun and found himself pointing his gun at empty space. “Who the fuck is that?”
“We asking the questions,” someone to his left said.
“You know who you’re fucking with?” Duffy said as he swept his gun back and forth, trying to find a target.
“You must be hard of hearing.” A beer can skirted down the hall and bounced off Duffy’s feet, causing him to discharge his gun. The sound of the shoot echoed off the walls, making Duffy’s ears ring.
“Muthafucka!” Duffy clutched his ear. At the end of the hall, he could see a youthful looking boy. He couldn’t hear him, but from the way he was doubled over and pointing, Duffy could tell he was laughing at him. “You little shit! I’m gonna kick your ass!” He charged down the hall in the direction of the boy and got within arm’s reach of him, before a foot came out of one of the abandoned apartments and tripped him. Duffy spilled onto his hands and knees, scraping one of his palms. Before he could right himself, something smashed into the back of his head and everything went black.
